What Should you Expect from your Game Programming Course

Game development is a relatively young industry, not more than 30 to 40 years. Game programming as a career has been around since games were made for the first digital device. In India, it has been around for even shorter a period and is taking shape as a viable career option since the mid-2000’s. The market is ever growing and demand for game content across the world and in India is on a rise. Game Industry is bigger than the film & music industry worldwide & is scaled up to 100 billion dollar in 2015. Game development companies are coming up at major tech education centres like Pune, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Noida & even smaller cities like Trivandrum, Mangalore, Kochi. The only challenge that the industry faces is good and capable manpower that is well trained in game development and its core aspects like game design, game art, and game programming. Most students join courses and spend a year or more studying only to find out that their training standards don’t meet what companies need today.

What should you look out for when selecting courses and schools?

The challenge on the training front

In an industry that is so young, it is tough to set standards to training. And that is the first and by far the biggest challenge for any game programming course today, especially in India. The lack of set standards makes it difficult for trainers to measure the success of their program and for students to decide on what is the very least they need to learn and know to begin their journey on this career path.

What you will commonly find

There is no lack for schools who claim to teach game programming. Most of these schools end up teaching you a course in 3D animation & 3d tools. 3d tools only help you to create the artwork, but games need design & programming too. Thus those who want to work on game art should learn 3d tools. But if you are more inclined towards programming and development you need to find out which programming languages, you will be learning. As a game programmer learning about vector maths, AI, network programming concepts, OOPS is most important

What you should be looking for

Game programming is like programming any software only a lot more specialized. It requires a strong basis in subjects like math and physics. And this has to be combined with specialized training in applying that knowledge into making games. At the risk of repeating ourselves, game making is new. There is no textbook that has been certified to have all the basics covered. That is why you need to have experts and industry names connected to the course and school.

If you are studying a curriculum designed with inputs from industry professionals who face the market every day, you are bound to be learning what they are looking for when they hire. How often do these names actually come down to the campus to interact with the students? Look for such facts. Another detail to look for is the industry experience that the faculty delivering the teaching on a daily basis has. Can they walk the talk?

Is it even possible to find a game programming course that has merit?

There aren’t many such courses available today but there are a few that have been consistently generating students that have managed to make their way in the field. One such course to look forward to is the BCA game programming to be launched by Seamedu School of pro-expressionism on the 15th July this year. They have been maintaining international standards through their association with edexcel over the years but this specific course developed in association with Rolocule Games and Shoonya 3D brings in elements to their already successful training methodology that guarantees a bright future.